The international community has bestowed very different labels on Aung San Suu Kyi and Omar al-Bashir: Burma’s de facto leader is a Nobel Laureate, while Sudan’s head of state is an indictee of the International Criminal Court. Today, however, as they both face worldwide condemnation, the United States is on the dangerous path to lose leverage to influence either.

In this report, authors Brian Adeba, Brad Brooks-Rubin, John Prendergast, and Jon Temin argue that the metastasizing crisis in South Sudan urgently requires a new strategy for achieving a sustainable peace.

The metastasizing crisis in South Sudan requires a new strategy for achieving a sustainable peace. Conditions on the ground are unbearable for large swathes of South Sudan’s population, and regional peacemaking efforts are not delivering results.

Rising instability and violence due to lack of a democratic transition brings new U.S. national security and regional threats; Enough Project calls for revved-up financial and diplomatic pressures on Kabila regime and its partners.

The Enough Project's new report recommends that an effective strategy to bring Congo back from the brink of crisis should focus on strongly supporting Congolese efforts to achieve a democratic transition through a much more robust strategy of financial pressure.

An effective strategy to bring Congo back from the brink of political and economic crisis should focus on achieving a democratic transition while also pushing for key structural reforms and immediate conflict mitigation steps in the Kasai region and the east.

In a joint letter, a coalition of 23 human rights and anti-corruption groups, including the Enough Project, called on the U.S. government to robustly implement the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act.

Enough Project policy report details “playbook” of tools available to policymakers to address corrupt elites, intractable conflicts in Africa A policy report published today by the Enough Project details how the international community, and in particular the United States, can exert powerful leverage to impact the calculations, behavior, and material position of violent kleptocratic […]

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) was passed in 1977 and prohibits U.S. persons from bribing foreign officials. The law was developed after an investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission found that in order to secure business opportunities overseas, over 400 U.S. companies had paid hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to foreign officials. The same investigation found that these firms were using “secret slush funds” and falsifying corporate records to disguise illicit payments to foreign officials (as well as illegal campaign contributions to U.S. politicians).

Corruption and money laundering go hand in hand. Money laundering is the effort to legitimize wealth obtained through the commission of a crime, often known as a “predicate offense.” Fraud, theft, bribery, and other acts associated with corruption are considered to be predicate offenses in most jurisdictions. A wide range of anti-money laundering provisions have come into force over the past century that can be used to combat corruption. However, numerous loopholes that remain in place allow ill-gotten gains to enter the United States with ease and prevent efforts aimed at tracing and seizing the proceeds of corruption.

Sanctions are well-suited to countering violent kleptocracies because of their ability to impact the target regime’s wealth. Sanctions can alter kleptocrats’ problematic incentive structures, which favor continued conflict over peace due to the prospect of financial gain from war. To be most effective, however, sanctions must be strategic in both design and implementation.